Blind Medusa: The Portrayal of Liza Pursewarden in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet

Allison Kreuiter

doi:10.25159/2412-8457/10159

Authors

Allison Kreuiter University of South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-8457/10159

Keywords:

Durrell, Gothic, fetish, Liza Pursewarden, Medusa

Abstract

In Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the major female characters, Justine and Clea, each have their own eponymous books. However, minor female characters in the novels have notably received more limited scholarly attention. This article will consider one of these marginal female characters, Liza Pursewarden, who appears in both the novels Mountolive and Clea. I will argue that the portrayal of Liza, by David Mountolive, her brother Ludwig Pursewarden and the character L. G. Darley, moulds her into a Gothicised fetish object onto which they project their fear of castration and lack.

References

Apter, Emily, and William Pietz. 1993. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. New York: Cornell University Press.

Bal, Mieke. 1994. “Head Hunting: ‘Judith’ on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 19 (3): 3–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/030908929401906301.

Bal, Mieke. 1996. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge.

Bal, Mieke. 1997. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, translated by Anna-Louise Milne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bal, Mieke. 2006. A Mieke Bal Reader. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Bass, Alan. 2018. Fetishism, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315150062.

Böhme, Hartmut. 2014. Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity, translated by Anna Galt. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110303452.

Bryson, Norman. 1983. Vision and Painting. Yale University Press: New Haven. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08367-1.

Calefato, Patrizia. 2004. The Clothed Body, translated by Lisa Adams. London and New York Berg. https://doi.org/10.2752/9780857854049.

Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1 (4) Summer: 875–893. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306.

Creed, Barbara. 1994. The Monstrous-Feminine. London and New York: Routledge.

Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7137.001.0001.

Durrell, Lawrence. 1961. Mountolive. London: Faber and Faber.

Durrell, Lawrence. 1963. Clea. London: Faber and Faber.

Foster, Hal. 2003. “Medusa and the Real.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 44 (Autumn): 181–190. https://doi.org/10.1086/RESv44n1ms20167613.

Freud, Sigmund. 1961 [1927]. “Fetishism.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 21, edited by James Strachey, 152–157. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1964 [1922]. “Medusa’s Head.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 18, edited by James Strachey, 273–275. London: Hogarth Press.

Garber, Marjorie, and Nancy Vickers. 2003. “Introduction.” In The Medusa Reader, edited by Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers, 1–7. New York: Routledge.

Iacono, Maurizio. 2016. The History and Theory of Fetishism, translated by Victoria Tchernichova. London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137541154_5.

Jones, Ernest. 1977. Papers on Psycho-Analysis. London: Karnac Books.

Kaplan, Louise J. 2006. Cultures of Fetishism. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601208.

Kofman, Sarah. 1985. The Enigma of Women. Woman in Freud’s Writing, translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

KreilKamp, Ivan. 2005. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484865.

Krips, Henry. 1999. Fetish: An Erotics of Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501731815.

Kristeva, Julia. 2012. The Severed Head: Capital Visions, translated by Jody Gladding. Columbia University Press: New York.

Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis vol.1, translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge,

Morris, Rosalind C, and Daniel H. Leonard. 2017. The Returns of Fetishism. Charles de Brosse and the Afterlives of an Idea. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3: 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

Mulvey, Laura. 1996. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 2016. “The Female Gothic Body.” In Woman and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 106–119, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748699124.003.0008.

Neumann, Erich. 2002. Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine. London and New York: Routledge.

Peirce, Carol. 1990. “That ‘One Book There, a Plutarch’: Of Isis and Osiris in The Alexandria Quartet.” In On Miracle Ground: Essays on the Fiction of Lawrence Durrell, edited by Michael H. Begnal, 79–92. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP.

Penley, Constance. 1990. The Future of an Illusion Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pietz, William. 1987. “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring): 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/RESv13n1ms20166762.

Saunders, Gill. 1989. The Nude: A New Perspective. New York: Harper & Row.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1981. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 96 (2): 255–270. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/461992.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1986. Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York Methuen. https://doi.org/10.2307/461992.

Shuttleworth, Sally. 1996. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582226.

Silverman, Kaja. 1984. “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice.” In Re-Vision Essay in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Ann Doane; Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, 131–149. Frederick MD: University Publications of America.

Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Spooner, Catherine. 2004. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1993. “Maleficium: State Fetishism.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, 217–247. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence. New York: Continuum Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501382901.

Warwick, Alexandra, and Dani Cavallaro. 1998. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body. Oxford: Berg.

Watt, R. J. C. 2000. “Hopkins and the Body Gothic.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 60–89. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.